Webex acquired by Cisco

A PR announcement from Webex today, announced the acquisition of the company by Cisco:

"As collaboration in the workplace becomes increasingly important,
companies are looking for rich communications tools to help them work
more effectively and efficiently," said Charles H. Giancarlo, Chief
Development Officer at Cisco. "The combination of Cisco and WebEx will
deliver compelling solutions accelerating this next wave of business
communications.

Cisco believes the network is a platform for all forms of
communications and collaboration, and WebEx’s technology and services
portfolio complement Cisco’s leadership in the Unified Communications
and collaboration market, while providing Cisco with a new and unique
business model to expand its presence in the fast-growing SMB market,"
Giancarlo continued.

"Cisco and WebEx share a vision of web collaboration as a key to
accelerating business processes and critical to durable competitive
advantage," said Subrah S. Iyar, CEO of WebEx. "Cisco’s global reach
and customer focus will help us extend our core web collaboration
applications and continue to broaden the services we offer through the
WebEx Connect platform."

This all sounds like a rather interesting combination of technologies – with the deal expected to be closed late 2007 (providing government / legislative requirements are met) I guess we’ll have to wait for 2008 to see what goodies are in store and what the acquisition implies!